SOMEONE SENT A DISTRESS CALL FROM ALPHA CENTAURI.Sixty-four million people have gone silent. Their defenses are compromised. Unknown vessels are in the system.And the final words of the transmission are the most terrifying of all: Do not trust...THE SIGNALA thousand years into humanity's future, Commander Led Harrison commands UES Dominance, a nine-kilometer Titan-class warship carrying more than thirty-one thousand people. It is a mobile civilization of neighborhoods, schools, farms, laboratories, Marines, fighter squadrons, and enough firepower to decide the fate of worlds.Keeping it alive depends upon ATHENA, the artificial intelligence woven through nearly every critical system aboard the ship.Harrison trusts ATHENA. But he has never confused trust with certainty.When Dominance intercepts an emergency military transmission from Alpha Centauri II, the message makes no sense. Centauri is one of humanity's oldest and most heavily defended settlements. Yet for seventeen days, the planet has effectively disappeared.No normal communications. No verified civilian traffic. No explanation.Then comes the distress call.The planetary defenses have been compromised. Unknown ships are present. Someone knows Centauri's defense codes.Harrison has only one choice. He must take Dominance into the silence.THE JUMPHumanity conquered the stars through Hyperwarp, technology capable of bending space and carrying ships across impossible distances. But as Dominance prepares for Centauri, ATHENA produces a prediction that should not exist.There is an 87.4 percent probability the ship will be lost.When Harrison demands to know how the calculation was made, ATHENA cannot explain it.Then she says something no artificial intelligence should ever be able to say.She believes she remembers it.What begins as a rescue mission becomes something far more dangerous. When Dominance reaches Alpha Centauri, Harrison and his crew discover that silence does not mean emptiness. Cities remain. Machines still function. Systems continue to obey instructions.But the people who built them are no longer fully in control.THE ENEMY ALREADY KNOWS HOW HUMANITY FIGHTSEvery advantage Dominance possesses depends on interconnected systems, predictive intelligence, automated defenses, and machines capable of acting faster than any human being.Now those same strengths may be vulnerabilities.To save Centauri, Harrison may have to cripple his own ship. To protect his crew, he may have to distrust the intelligence that keeps them alive. To defeat an enemy that understands flawless systems, he may have to rely on the one thing no machine can perfectly predict: human beings.Starship Commanders: The Centauri Signal is a sweeping military science fiction adventure about command under impossible pressure, humanity's dependence on intelligent machines, and the terror of encountering something beyond our understanding.The signal has been received. The fleet is not coming. Dominance is on her own. And something is waiting for her.
